Education arrived in this corner of NW1 in an odd order. A college for horses came first, then a school that argued girls should sit the same examinations as their brothers, then the parish schools, and finally the great brick board schools that the state built once it accepted that every child had to be taught. All four kinds of institution are still standing, and most are still teaching.
A veterinary college among the fields
The oldest teaching institution here was not built for children at all. The Veterinary College, London — later the Royal Veterinary College — was founded in 1791 on ground in the old parish of St Pancras that its Camden campus on Royal College Street still occupies. It was the first veterinary school in Britain, following the example of the school established at Lyon in 1762, and its first principal, Charles Vial de St Bel, came from that French establishment. Teaching began in January 1792 with a tiny first intake working through a three-year course. When it opened, the site was open country north of the city; within two generations Camden Town had closed around it on every side. A royal charter followed in 1875, and the college joined the University of London in 1949.
Frances Mary Buss and the Camden Town experiment
In 1850 Frances Mary Buss, then in her early twenties, opened the North London Collegiate School in Camden Town. It is generally recognised as the first day school in the country to offer girls a genuinely academic education, and it was pitched at families who could not afford a governess but would not send their daughters to a charity school. Buss opened a second, cheaper school in Kentish Town in 1871 — the Camden School for Girls — to extend the same idea to households of more modest means. The North London Collegiate eventually left the borough for a site further out; the Camden School for Girls is still here. English Heritage commemorates Buss with a blue plaque.
The same Victorian impulse produced an institution for adults. The Working Men's College was founded in 1854 by a group of Christian Socialists with F. D. Maurice as its first principal, and drew in supporters and teachers including John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Tom Hughes. It began in Bloomsbury and moved in 1905 to purpose-built, now listed premises on Crowndale Road, where it remains. A separate Working Women's College, founded in the 1860s, merged with it in 1967.
Church schools and the parish of St Paul's
Primrose Hill's oldest surviving school grew out of a Sunday school attached to St Paul's Church on Avenue Road, meeting at first in rooms in a house off King's College Road. In 1872 a ninety-nine-year lease was granted for land in Winchester Road, and a school was built there in 1873 with separate rooms for boys, girls and infants, taking children from five to thirteen. Under the 1944 Education Act it took voluntary status and became a mixed infant and junior school. Plans for a new building in Elsworthy Road were drawn up in the early 1960s, and the school moved there in stages in 1972 — a century after that first lease was signed.
Princess Road and the London School Board
The 1870 Education Act created elected school boards with the power to build where existing provision fell short, and the School Board for London put up something in the order of four hundred schools in the thirty years of its existence: tall, gabled, sturdy buildings that still rise above the surrounding rooftops across inner London. One of them went up on what had been a field on Princess Road. The date 1885 is cut into the stone above the entrance, and the school opened on 9 February 1886 with around nine hundred children on its roll. The frontage is yellow stock brick with stone and red brick dressings under tiled roofs, in the Flemish Renaissance manner the board's architects favoured under E. R. Robson, their first chief architect and the author of School Architecture (1874); the building is listed. Children are said to have known it as the "Smut School", because soot from the railway engines working below settled on their clothes.
Evacuation, return and what survived inside
War interrupted every school in the district. In 1939 most of the Princess Road children were evacuated to Fleetville School in Hertfordshire and stayed away until 1945; the arches beneath their own building sheltered those who remained. St Paul's went to Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire together with All Souls School from Loudoun Road, and when the two came back All Souls' building had been bombed, so its children stayed on at Winchester Road.
What is unusual about these buildings is how much of the original fabric is still in daily use. At Princess Road the school records glazed partitions, cupboards and windows from the 1880s, steel beams made at Coalport in Shropshire, green and brown staircase tiles and parquet floors, along with logbooks from the 1920s and 1930s still kept on site. Former pupils in their nineties have come back to look at rooms they last sat in before the war.